The Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health proposes to host a national conference for up to 100 people on patient advocacy from a public health perspective. It will take place in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, from March 16-18, 2005. For the conference, patient advocacy is defined as an intervention at the individual, organization, community, or populations aimed at (a) improving patients' health care delivery experience as well as their health outcomes by (b) putting them at the center of their own care. The conference, which builds on outcomes from a previous Patient Advocacy Summit held in 2003, will bring together leaders from a wide spectrum of professions (physicians and other health care providers, social workers, lawyers, public health professionals, heads of nonprofit and grassroots organizations, parent-advocates, citizen advocates, etc.). The conference's primary aim is to begin the dissemination process of up to 15 commissioned, research-based papers focused on patient advocacy from a public health perspective. Secondary aims include fostering alliances among professional committed to patient advocacy and further developing a research and action agenda. Paper topics might include: cultural literacy and the patient-provider relationship; system-level changes for patients with chronic diseases or multiple health problems; lay health advocacy for patients navigating health systems; developing and disseminating tools to consumers that support informed decision-making and informed consent; best practices in patient advocacy by and for nonprofit organizations. All papers will include a focus on vulnerable and underserved populations, including the elderly, children with terminal diseases, ethnic minorities, the uninsured or underinsured, and low-literacy populations. The papers will form the basis of a textbook, to be edited and published as one of the chief products of the conference. They will also form the basis of a distance-learning course from UNC-Chapel Hill.